Lolita

Lolita, visibly pregnant and wearing pink-rimmed glasses, answers the door. Humbert realizes he still loves her even though she is no longer a nymphet. Dick, her husband, is working in the backyard with a friend named Bill, who is missing an arm due to an injury from the war. Dick is a simple man who does not impress Humbert. When Humbert realizes he is not Trapp, Humbert decides not kill him. Lolita tells Humbert that Dick does not know anything about her relationship with Humbert and thinks that Lolita simply chose to run away from her rich father to seek a simple life working in a small-town diner. Humbert demands to know the identity of the man with whom she ran away years before. She tells him to forget the incident, but he persists. Lolita admits that Trapp was Clare Quilty.

Lolita tells Humbert that he was a good father and that Quilty was the great love of Lolita’s life. Quilty knew Charlotte, Lolita’s mother, through his uncle, the dentist named Ivor Quilty; he had once kissed a ten-year-old Lolita in front of an audience. Later, Quilty recognized her when she and Humbert were at the Enchanted Hunters, where he was staying and writing a play. Dick enters the house at this point in the story, and Lolita introduces Dick and Humbert before she goes to the kitchen to find cold beer for Dick and Bill. Humbert tries to make small talk with Dick, but Dick is hard of hearing, and Humbert recognizes that he does not wish Dick ill.

When Dick goes back to work outside, Lolita continues to tell her story. While smoking, Lolita reminds Humbert of her mother; she goes on to say that everyone called Quilty “Cue,” a nickname that reminds Humbert of the name of the camp where she and Quilty had met him the summer Humbert married Charlotte. Quilty and Lolita had furthered their relationship while rehearsing his play at school in Beardsley, despite warnings from her acting teacher that Quilty almost went to jail as a result of his penchant for young girls. After Lolita ran away, she lived at his ranch, the Duk Duk, with him and his friends. They performed strange sexual acts while drunk or high, and Quilty tried to persuade Lolita to participate in group sex and to appear in a pornographic film. When she refused, saying she wanted only him, he threw her out. Alone, she found a job as a waitress and eventually met her husband.

Humbert is heartbroken by her story and recognizes that he will love her forever. He tells her he will give her money if she is certain she will never love him again or be willing to live with him. She thinks Humbert means that he will give her money if she sleeps with him at a motel, but Humbert explains that the money is hers regardless of her decision to sleep with him—he is not interested in sex alone. He realizes she never understood that about him.

Lolita explains to Humbert that she would sooner go back to Quilty than Humbert; Humbert imagines her as saying that Quilty broke her heart while Humbert broke her life. Humbert gives her $4,000, which is most of the money he made by renting out the Haze house all these years, and she offers him a kiss and calls him “honey” for the first time. She says goodbye after refusing his final plea, and as he drives away, he is crying. At this point, Humbert tells the reader that Lolita is dead.

Humbert leaves Coalmont and cannot recall the numbers of the roads he takes to Beardsley. He gets lost and stuck in a muddy ditch. Humbert walks for miles in the rain to find someone to help him pull the car out. At midnight, he finds that he is exhausted. He pulls over in a small town not far from the Enchanted Hunters and notes how many nights he has spent in various small American towns, asking the reader to let him “dally a little” (282) before he gets to the point of his story, as Quilty is already as good as dead. 

Humbert reviews his life while at a restaurant between Coalmont and Ramsdale, feeling he can now see himself and his love in a complete way. He recalls a priest in Quebec who discussed sin with Humbert and offered Humbert spiritual comfort. Humbert now sees that he will never be able to forgive himself for all the pain he inflicted on “Dolores Haze,” as he now refers to Lolita. Humbert recognizes that he has deprived Lolita of a childhood, and, while quoting a line of verse, Humbert notes that art and morality must be connected.

Humbert, now aware of the hurt he has caused Lolita, reflects on how little he knew about Lolita. He had not tried to understand her. He remembers her once saying that the saddest thing about dying was that everyone dies alone. At this point, Humbert starts to write to Lolita herself. He then tells of a time when Lolita was moved to tears by a humdrum but affectionate gesture that took place between a friend and her father. Lolita had once asked Humbert where Charlotte was buried, and Humbert now realizes that a simple life with Charlotte would have been better for Lolita than her life with him. 

Back in Ramsdale, for the first time in years, Humbert visits the Haze house while wearing mud-splattered pants and the sweater he used for target practice. Though he sees a nymphet occupying the Haze house of which he is technically the landlord, he does not enter the house, recognizing that his appearance will startle the family. He cleans up at the hotel and walks through town, running into a woman who asks about Lolita. He lies and says that she has married a successful engineer. When the woman criticizes Lolita and mentions her own daughter, Humbert asks if her daughter ever mentioned what Charlie Holmes did to the girls at camp. The woman scolds him for mentioning Charlie, who has just been killed in Korea.

Humbert visits his new lawyer, Windmuller, who organizes the estate with ease. He explains Lolita’s whereabouts. He then heads to Dr. Ivor Quilty’s office under the pretext of asking about the cost of some dental work. There, he learns that Clare Quilty is likely at his “ancestral home, Grimm Road, not far from Parkington” (291). Humbert says that Dr. Quilty is not as good a dentist as another more expensive dentist he knows and leaves in a hurry. 

From a gas station attendant, Humbert learns how to get to Grimm Road. Humbert calls Quilty’s house in order to make sure Quilty is home, but the phone line has been disconnected. Humbert drives through a thick forest before arriving at Pavor Manor, a wooden house with a turret and yellow and red glowing windows. He imagines Quilty surrounded by “his henchmen and whores” (292) and drives back into town. He finds a bobby pin of Lolita’s in the car, and, while driving through town looking for a hotel, he notices a drive-in movie featuring a character drawing a gun.

Humbert goes to Pavor Manor with his gun the next day, worried he will bungle his execution of Quilty. A thunderstorm gives way to clear skies as he pulls up to the house. He wanders the luxurious and large home searching for Quilty and locking any open doors he finds. Quilty comes out of a bathroom, wearing a purple robe that reminds Humbert of one of his own robes. Humbert follows him until Quilty, clearly in an altered state, asks Humbert who he is. Humbert encourages Quilty to recall Lolita and to explain to him that he must die. Quilty makes puns and jokes, trying to light a cigarette. Humbert shoots but hits the rug, and Quilty tries to wrestle the gun away from him. Quilty tells Humbert that he did not kidnap Lolita but that he “saved her from a beastly pervert” (298). He admits that the road trip was “absurd” but that he is not responsible for raping her. They wrestle in a comical and unheroic way, and when Humbert regains the gun, Humbert forces Quilty to read a poem Humbert wrote that explains Quilty’s crimes. Quilty critiques the poem and tells Humbert that Lolita forced Quilty to rescue her from Humbert; he then tries to bribe Humbert with money, young girls, and pornography, but Humbert shoots again. Quilty escapes and runs through the house, but Humbert shoots him again as Quilty begs for his life. Though Humbert sees Quilty as a sick man and likens him to Charlotte in her sick bed, Humbert shoots him again, fatally.

By then, a group of people have entered the house and are entertaining themselves downstairs. Humbert admits to the reader that he does not feel any peace; he announces to the crowd that he has killed Quilty. No one believes him until Quilty himself crawls to the landing, where he dies. Humbert leaves, feeling as though he has performed the final play Quilty ever wrote. 

Humbert speeds off, driving on the wrong side of the road simply because he feels he can. After running a red light and driving into a field, Humbert is arrested. He recognizes that he regrets that Lolita never experienced a proper childhood. From jail, he writes that he is against capital punishment and would sentence himself to at least thirty-five years for rape but he would not charge himself with neither murder nor kidnapping. He announces he started writing the book fifty-six days prior and suggests that he thinks he has chosen the perfect pseudonym for himself, Humbert Humbert, as he wanted something with a doubling effect. He requests again that the book only be published decades later, after Lolita’s death.

He addresses the last paragraph to Lolita, advising her to stay faithful to Dick and not to let strangers talk to her nor touch her. He asks that she not mourn Quilty, as he feels Quilty had to die for the public good. Finally, given a choice between him and Quilty, he hopes she recognizes that Humbert had to live so that he can tell Lolita’s story and immortalize her through his own art.